I just got home from Texas, where on Monday we memorialized my dad, Ronald S. Kickler, or Ron to most. Because we had such a tight time frame, we didn't have a ton of attendance at his service, so I wanted to share my eulogy:

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, my dad Ron Kickler hung the moon. So it’s always seemed to me, his little girl.

He had the biggest heart, and the biggest imagination. If you knew my dad, you might have known how much he loved science fiction and fantasy, but especially the universes of “Star Wars” and “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy. He sometimes lost himself in those worlds of fantasy, but he also loved science and connected those fantasy worlds to reality and the immense galaxy of possibility surrounding us.

Dad loved talking “Star Wars,” but he taught me to look up at the skies, see the constellations around us and learn how through the eons, people have found guidance and opportunity in the stars. I remember as a little kid, going to Granddaddy’s farm in Frelsburg and spending a surprisingly mild night looking up in wonder. We spent a lot of time talking about space travel – and all the fascinating things that those actual rocket scientists were figuring out.

When we lost Maureen a couple of years ago, everything felt so raw and so difficult. But we found a safe space, if you’ll pardon the term, tracking the New Horizons exploratory vessel as it actually reached Pluto, and marveling at the newfound beauty of this no-longer-a-planet that was beyond human vision for so long. Just last week, a Japanese spacecraft that had failed got reprogrammed to get new angles on Neptune, and I couldn’t wait to talk to him about it and send him some links and pictures. But it was too late.

Dad loved rock music – and he loved rocks. He never met a rock he didn’t like, and he found beauty in the everyday – polishing agates to bring their inner beauty to the outside, collecting mineral specimens, always on the lookout for arrowheads. He usually had at least one rock in his pockets.

For all his fascination with science, Dad was weirdly thwarted by technology. He’d occasionally call me at my desk for guidance. Once, when work was still using older systems, he got a home computer that had a mouse and couldn’t make it do what it wanted.

“OK, just double-click on the icon.”

*click* *click*

“It didn’t work.”

“You have to click faster, like click-click.”

*click* *click*

“Still didn’t work.”

“OK, just click it and then hit Enter.”

“Got it!”

He eventually figured that out, and a couple of years ago, we finally got him to learn to text. But he could not figure out how to ignore the autocorrect suggestions, and he hated it.

“Well, shut happens, I guess,” went a typical note.

Dad, shut really does happen. Because here we are.

But we are here to celebrate him and to remember all the things that made him him. So let’s go back to that heart of his.

Dad always wanted the best for everyone, especially his family. He and Maureen loved each other so, so much, and their union brought Matthew into our lives too, turning me into a big sister, for which I will always be grateful.

After my mom and dad got divorced, I never lived full-time with Dad, but I hope he knows that I treasured every single second we had together. We spent a lot of time in the car when he picked me up for weekend visits or from the airport after I moved to Oregon. We had some of our best talks in the car. We cranked up the tunes, learned about each other’s music tastes and hopefully expanded each other’s horizons a little. We talked about movies and books and life and comedy.

Dad had a killer sense of humor and eye for the absurd. On our drives, he’d make up goofy words out of what he saw on license plates, or figure out how to say words backward. For your information, in my house, “elbow” will always be “woble" [wobbly … I’ll give you a minute]. And he may have been a pharmacist and a science buff, but he always paid attention to grammar. When I was interviewing for my first journalism job, an editor asked where I thought my love for words and wordplay came from. I had zero hesitation: “My dad.”

He has fundamentally shaped me and my personality, even over long distance (and long-distance phone bills I would occasionally get in trouble for). I see his personality coming through in my sons Isaac and Aaron, in their intellect, their curiosity, their mischievous grins, and did I ever tell you about the time I asked Isaac why his backpack was so heavy? “What do you have in there, a bag of rocks?”

He did indeed have a bag of rocks. The Kickler is strong with this one.

Dad’s big, open heart left him susceptible to heartbreak, and in the face of staggering losses in the past few years, especially his sweet Maureen, but also his parents and his brother, he had trouble finding the light through the clouds.

I wish he’d known how many of us were rooting for him. To get out of the house, to get out of his head, to make that doctor’s appointment, to eat a good meal, to bring his goofy smile and his big hugs back out into the open.

I have to believe he sees it now, that he feels our love.

I have lost my tether; I feel unmoored, drifting. But while he’s gone, he’s not gone. He believed in that “star stuff” idea of Carl Sagan’s, so while I am drifting now, I’ll keep looking to the skies for his guidance.

Sweet dreams, Dad. I love you, as Isaac once wrote, to New Horizons and back times infinity.

Dad's obit:

Ronald Selton Kickler, a retired pharmacist with a long history serving customers at HEB, Randalls, Apple Tree and Safeway stores, died January 16, 2018, at age 65 at his home in Friendswood, Texas. Ron was born August 7, 1952, in Pasadena, Texas, to Selton Noble Kickler and Helen Cates Kickler. After graduating from Pasadena High School in 1970, he earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Houston in 1974 and graduated from the University’s School of Pharmacy in 1976.

Ron was always kind to his pharmacy customers, giving them a few extra minutes to talk when he could. His listening was much appreciated, which was never more clear than during the holidays every year, when he’d bring home stacks of cards and plates full of baked goods and boxes of candy.

Ron married Ann Walters in 1974, and in 1977 they welcomed a daughter, Sarah. They later divorced. He married Maureen Jones in 1985, becoming father to Matthew. Ron and Maureen married again, for good measure, in 1996, and lived in Pearland and Friendswood over the course of their laughter-filled relationship. Ron was passionate about “Star Wars” and J.R.R. Tolkien, rereading the Lord of the Rings trilogy annually, and he taught his kids it was cool to be a nerd (before it was actually cool to be a nerd).

Ron was preceded in death by his wife Maureen in 2015; his parents; and his brother, John Kickler.

Survivors include his daughter Sarah Kickler Kelber of Salem, Oregon; son Matthew Jones of Friendswood, Texas; son-in-law Judah Kelber and grandsons Isaac and Aaron Kelber, all of Salem, Oregon.

OK, so ... last year my Christmakkah present was an Instant Pot. We already had a stovetop pressure cooker that Judah used a ton, but it made me nervous and I didn't use it much. We weren't sure how much use the IP would actually get, but it turns out that we love it. We've used it at least once a week since last November, and often multiple times a day.

Some basics: Easy hard-boiled eggs. Easy overnight steel-cut oats. Every stew that usually tastes better the next day tastes good immediately because pressure. Also, I highly recommend the Facebook community Instant Pot Recipes. It's run by my cousin-in-law Coco Morante, who also has a killer book on the topic that we gifted to several people this year. It's so good.

So after a year with the Instant Pot, here are some faves:

Nom Nom Paleo's Kalua Pork. Yes. Make this.It’s like three ingredients, a couple of hours, and the payoff is fantastic. (Paleo and Whole30 compliant, if that's your thing.)

Judah made this Texas-Style Chili con Carne recipe from Serious Eats in the pressure cooker. It. Was. Fabulous. Highly recommend. The hardest part was finding all those chiles at the store. We need to make this again stat.

Judah has made of Nom Nom Paleo Bo Kho (though he used chuck instead of short ribs): Another good one.

Pulled Pork Adobo from Coco's cookbook is amazing. Not linked, but in the book, the Plum Chile Chicken is also fab.

Earlier this year, inspired by some friends doing the same thing, I decided I was going to try to go sugar-free for March. Well ... kind of. I was going to try to avoid added sugars as much as was feasible, just to prove to myself that I could do it -- and also as an experiment. (Fruit and naturally occurring sugars in other foods were 100 percent OK, and Judah still added a touch of honey and molasses to the fruit/veggie/omegas/Vitamin D smoothies he makes most mornings.)

It's been an interesting 31 days.

The first thing I noticed was that sugar is in damn near everything. I mean, I knew that, but it was a different experience when I started actually looking at the labels. Nearly every bread product, every bar (Luna, Lara, Kind -- stuff I'd keep in my purse for snacks), every sauce, every dressing. Everything. So that was an eye-opening experience.

The thing I was trying to test myself on the most was my on-again, off-again relationship with soda and my propensity to talk myself into desserts and other treats, instead of out of them. The second major lesson of this month is that, even though we bring very few sugary treats into the house, I am faced with them on a regular basis nonetheless: birthday cupcakes, cake, three kinds of cookies at work! Sharing a dessert at a family event! Free cookie for the kids at the grocery store -- so why don't I get one too? My latest temptation: the Jelly Belly dispenser at the office. It's not as pervasive as the "a few grams here, a few grams there" situation in every other food, but I am much more tempted by cake and cookies than salad dressing (you know, like most people).

So how did I do? Some confessions: I had one Hamantaschen (the cookies typically made to celebrate the Jewish holiday of Purim) after 1) reading about them and 2) smelling the hundreds of them baked for a synagogue fundraiser. But that was a planned indulgence, and a limited one. Last week, I was at OMSI and I discovered that they carried locally made macarons. I had not even *seen* a macaron since we moved, and they are small, so I purchased one. And I savored it greatly. I had one very strange night at work where I got hives and then took two antihistamines, which made me super woozy. Nothing else was helping, and I had to get through the shift, so I went to my old standby and bought a can of Coke. I sipped it for a while until I did start to feel a little better -- maybe a quarter or a third, and I trashed the rest. Also, while I replaced most of my non-water-drinking with unsweetened iced tea (it turns out it's SO GOOD!), I did have kombucha (fermented tea) a couple of times a week. But that was also planned. Here and there, I am sure I had sauces that had some sugar when I was at a restaurant and couldn't check, but overall, I think I did pretty well.

What are my takeaways? First off, I *can* say no to sugar when I put my mind to it. There were some tough situations -- brunch at the Original Pancake House, I didn't have a single bite of pancakes, even though I was surrounded. The day I had the single hamantaschen, there were actually two more kinds of cookies going around the office. Under other circumstances, I'm sure I would have had some of that, too. I didn't really crave Coke or other soda very much. I also discovered that plain soda water, which I was drinking to help with my carbonation craving, makes me feel terrible. So back to tea and water it is!

What happens next? I am not giving up sugar for good. I guaran-damn-tee you that tomorrow, I am having a salted caramel chocolate chip cookie from Great Harvest. That is happening.

But I am taking my new awareness of my ability to say "no" most of the time and making that my default when faced with dessert. I will keep on with my unsweetened iced tea. I will eat some more of the yummy things I discovered when I was searching for sugar-free options. (E.g., broccoli slaw, pomegranate seeds, balsamic vinegar and olive oil is an amazing salad. Jicama strips are good with dip or without. Roasted beets are like candy! Almonds have a nice natural sweetness that's easier to notice when you're not popping jelly beans in the same hour.) I'll keep experimenting with eating clean, meal and snack planning, and trying new things.

On Feb. 10, just two weeks ago, we lost my grandfather Jim Walters quite unexpectedly. You can read a little bit more about him in his obituary here.

At his memorial service a few days later, I found myself delivering a eulogy for him, alongside his brother, Bill, and family friend Ralph, as well as my best friend of one thousand years, Kim, who read a poem on behalf of my mom.

(An aside: I feel like we need a better word for this than "eulogy," because that sounds so cold, and if I can speak for my fellow speakers, what we were trying to do was capture the warmth and the life and the love and the humor of Jim. Of course, now that I look at the etymology of the word, I see it's rooted in something along the lines of "high praise." OK, that I can get. But I digress.)

It's not like I had ever planned to deliver a eulogy for anyone, ever, but after Jim's sudden passing, I felt all these stories welling up, and I knew I'd have to write it all down even if I didn't say it. But then I decided I wanted to say it. As I tried to put it all together, though, I was lost at how to start it. That was when I heard that his former students were sharing stories on Facebook, and I was pointed toward an alumni page there to read more. Then things came together.

Here is, approximately, my memorial for my Grandpa Jim (or GPJ, as he signed his emails to me):

Thanks to family friend Pam Burris, we learned yesterday that there was a thread on Facebook on the South Houston High School alumni page where some of his students were sharing their memories of their chemistry teacher Mr. Walters. As his family, it’s not always easy to get a sense of what Jim was like as a teacher, so here are a couple of the posts:

When they were making a big deal about LSD in the news my senior year, he informed us that it was so simple to make, that even a high school chemistry teacher could make a batch and then informed us that we were NOT going to learn how.

Mr Walters had 1/2 of a finger missing on one hand…. the 1st day of chemistry, he told us to be very careful with acids in the lab. The entire time he had poured what he told us was sulfuric acid into a beaker and began stirring the acid with a "complete' finger but after a minute or two jumped back and held up the hand with 1/2 digit !!!! the entire class gasped and some turned pale…. He was a character but a teacher that cared about “his kids.”

Now I want to talk a little bit about what it was like to be the granddaughter of a chemistry teacher.

The first computer I ever saw was in Jimmy’s study. I didn’t know then what the term “early adopter” meant, but the sight of that Apple IIe when I was in elementary school is surely proof that he was one. Luckily for me, he was generous with his gadgets and showed me how the computer worked -- and let me play games on it, long before other kids my age got to play Oregon Trail in the computer lab at school. And just for the record, he’s the only one I know of in our family who had an iPhone 5.

I’ll never forget the day he brought me a microscope -- whether it was a garage-sale find or something he’d had stashed away, I don’t know. He showed me how, even though they didn’t look that different, up close sugar crystals had their jagged edges and salt crystals were perfect cubes, functions of their chemical structures. It was a revelation that there was so much going on in the world than meets the eye.

I remember Jim helping me with a science fair project and determinedly trying to teach me to use a slide rule. That last one didn’t quite work out, nor did I become a scientist, but he fostered a sense of curiosity in me that I was always be grateful for.

I said at first that I wanted to talk about being the granddaughter of a chemistry teacher, but Jim was so much more -- a triathlete, for one thing, an entrepreneur, a fixer, a thinker, a solver, a joker.

And he had a way of seeing the big picture that I think eludes a lot of us. Let me offer one last anecdote. About 15 years ago, when I was just starting out in my professional newspaper career, he gave me a book he’d read called “Being Digital.” This was in the late-90s, but it took a hard look at technology and what is far-reaching effects might eventually be. We talked on and off over the years about that -- how the digital world was causing a sea change in print journalism. He saw this looming on the horizon 15 years ago, but only now are newspaper people starting to wrestle with what happens next.

Sometimes I think that it can be hard to see your family members for who they truly are because they are so close. But with the clarity that loss brings, as Maya Angelou so sagely noted, I feel like I can see the big picture that is my grandfather -- all the different ways he had an effect on the world.

He was so steadfast and so stalwart that we’d started to think that he would always be with us, and that he was invincible. We are stunned to learn that the latter is not true, but relieved that the former most definitely is. We’ll always be his granddaughters, his students, and you his friends, his daughter, his son, his brother, his beloved wife, and all his family.

I read a story the other day about scientists discovering that they could actually see the process of memories being made in the brain, some extremely groundbreaking stuff here. I am heartbroken that I won’t be able to talk to Jim about that, but I’m thankful for the chance to have made so many memories with him.

Since then, I've read a few more anecdotes from his students.

I can tell you that we had a chemistry lab class that was for Chemistry II in the morning before school started. I remember a couple of things about the lab. We made Nitrogen Triiodide which is a contact explosive. Weird stuff, smoked the hinges off one of the cabinets where we accidentally spilled some. Poured some in the hallway and when it dried, it would pop under peoples shoes when they walked on it. COOL!

He was a very good Chemistry teacher and very patient. He had to be with me!! I blew up the lab one morning very early and he was so nice to me ... I was a mess. If we were voting for teacher of the year when we were in school, I would have voted for him.

I think I made quite an impression on Mr. Walters. If he ever told a story about someone in his Biology class fainting and getting a concussion hitting the lab stool after trying to type blood. It was me. Picture poor Mr. Walters carrying me to the clinic. It was years before I ever found out my blood type. He was a wonderful teacher.

He was a great teacher. Thanks to him and my lab partner David Carpenter I actually passed Chemistry. It was a subject I didn't like but Mr Walters made it interesting. Sorry to hear of his passing

Mr. Walters was the first teacher who told me I was smart and should consider a science profession. I floated on a cloud for weeks. Unfortunately, I chose a different profession but I still remember his kindness.

As I mentioned in my speech, it is not always easy to get a sense of what a family member is like as a teacher, especially from a student's perspective. The classroom is its own little insular world, and getting a peek inside, especially from a generation or two away, is about as likely as turning into a literal fly on a wall.

So I've been especially thankful for these stories about Jim because they give us more insight into a role he lived so long and so well but that we were not witness to. I read these, and I can picture him at the front of the classroom and see how the personality I knew as his granddaughter came through to others as his students.

I've been inspired by this experience to think about the teachers who have made a difference in my life. Now it's time to reach out to them.

I hope you will think about reaching out to some of your teachers, too. If you do, I'd love to hear about it in the comments. I'll report back on my conversations as well.

And if you feel like sharing this on social media, why not tag it #mrwaltersproject.

I can't help but feel like GPJ would get a kick out of being a hashtag.

Yesterday, I posted my 1,000th Instagram picture, and today I feel like talking about it.

I joined Instagram just as Judah was preparing for his deployment to Afghanistan and was starting to have to travel for training. (It was kind of like a breaking-in period -- we got used to being apart for a couple weeks here, a few weeks there, and then, suddenly, seven months. But I digress.)

I'd started and failed to keep up with a couple of Project 365s in the past, plus I was going to be solo parenting -- and giving birth to our second child -- while he was gone, as well as working full time and commuting. Thus, I didn't aim to take a picture a day, or really anything with any sort of regularity. But the fact of the matter was, my phone became the most reliable way to communicate with my husband (though typically not phone call ) while he was training in California or Quantico or D.C. and once he departed for Afghanistan. I never knew when I might get an email or a Facebook message or the occasional call, so quite quickly, my phone, my lifeline, became attached to me in a way it hadn't been before. And the end result of that was that my phone became the camera I was mostly likely to have with me.

Yeah, Instagram sometimes gets a bad rap for its supposedly excessive filters, but I liked the ability to easily crop a photo, maybe brighten it up or add some contrast, and then share it over a few other social-media options if I wanted to (and also archive it on Flickr).

Within a few weeks, my Instagram account had started to become a record of our family's deployment life. As the weeks passed, I'd find myself scrolling back through my feed, seeing Isaac get younger before my eyes and being reminded of the experiences we'd been having. Once Aaron arrived, his face joined the feed, of course, and even our family's reunion when Judah came home was also documented there.

By then, Instagram was a habit, and I'm glad it has been. Going back through my 1,000 moments, I see a record of our family's everyday life, moments I wouldn't have captured with my several-pound SLR, plus things I thought were funny or just struck me in one way or another at any given time.

Looking through my Flickr feed, which has many of my SLR photos with my Instagrams sprinkled among them, I notice that there is a different feel to the Instagrams. Sure, the technical quality usually isn't as good as my SLR shots, but there in those shots is my real life, sometimes a little blurry, sometimes a little overexposed, sometimes clear as day. And I'm glad to have it on record.

It’s March 12, 2012, Judah’s first week home after getting back from Afghanistan. We’re at H-Mart, because how better to re-acclimate yourself to the U.S. than wandering around the market where whole aisles of things are marked in languages other than English?

My cell phone rings. It’s Tim, wanting to check in about my return to work in a few weeks. And then he mentions: “Mary had an idea. She really enjoyed your photos of Judah meeting Aaron and reuniting with Isaac and was wondering if you’d consider writing a story about it.”

I said, “Oh, really? Um, sure. I’d been thinking about pitching something for the magazine maybe. Is that what you guys were thinking?”

“I’m pretty sure she’s thinking for the front page.”

Whoa. Really? I felt like I had something to say about my experiences having a baby while Judah was far away but still connected via technology, but I wasn’t sure how to make it play in the news section.

But Mary was sure. Before my official return to work, I stopped by the newsroom to introduce Aaron around and say hi and I stopped in Mary’s office. I talked to her for a while about how I should approach it. “Just tell your story,” she told me. “The rest will work itself out.”

So I left. And I wrote. And wrote. And wrote some more. And a little more after that. And ended up dropping a hefty 60+-inch draft onto my editors’ metaphorical desks upon my return to the office.

With some tweaks, some restructuring, a rewrite, a melding of the two versions, and a subtraction of about 25 inches of copy, thanks to the work of several editors … lo and behold, my story really did land on the front page of The Sun the Sunday before the Fourth of July.

I’ve been thinking about how this all came to pass today, since I found out the essay garnered an award from the MDDC Press Association -- my first and, since I’m now outside the Maryland, Delaware, D.C. purview with our move to Oregon, my last.

Mary believed in me, and she made me believe that I could tell my family’s story and that people would care and relate and, hopefully, not find it too self-indulgent. (I do joke and call myself a professional oversharer sometimes, though.)

Thanks to her, I have this record of a period of my life that would otherwise start to fall victim to murky memory (the newborn stage has that tendency), and I got to share that with our readers. And my children will also have the longer, detailed story of that unique time in their lives, in the form of that bulky first draft.

That’s only the beginning. Working with Mary -- first as a slot to her section editor, then as a section editor to her department head, then as a content editor to her editor-in-chief -- informed every bit of my career at The Sun. Everything she worked on was better because she set high expectations for herself -- and we, in turn, for ourselves. She was creative, brilliant, hilarious, kind, generous.

I’m so grateful for my time with her, so angry that her time was cut so short. I just wish I could tell her thank you. For everything.

Emily, Mary, me, Cheryl, Lori and Molly at Cheryl's goodbye party in, can it be, 2003?

I never thought I’d find myself mourning a mullet, but last week, that’s exactly what happened.

My sweet baby A had a fair amount of hair when he was born, and like most babies, he lost it (starting with an epic bald spot on the back of his head) as he got older. Or at least, he lost most of it.

Along the edges, his newborn hair held on, and as the rest of his hair grew in, things just got ... unruly. Combed forward, parts were nearly an inch longer than the rest, but with no regularity. This usually blended in, though, unless too much food was applied to his 'do.

In the back, the whirliest part of his whirl got longer and longer, hanging over the back of his head, which had the shortest regrowth, kind of covering his baby bald spot, even when he wasn't technically bald there anymore.

And at the nape, it grew and grew -- baby in the back, big boy in the front.

I knew it wouldn’t last, and at bedtime, as he grabbed a lock of my hair to twirl as he drifted off, I often found myself with a lock of his unimaginably soft baby mullet wrapped around my finger, too.

After all, I was already wrapped around his finger, literally and figuratively.

After a while, people started assuming he was a girl, even with his dad’s countenance right there on his own face -- even if he was wearing one of those overly gender-defining “COOL DUDE” or “100% BOY” shirts.

But I didn’t care. That wasn’t the tipping point.

That was when, at bathtime, all that fine baby hair lumped together and started to look like a giant rat-tail.

A mullet I could deal with, but a rat-tail? I lived through that era non-ironically, and that was enough for me. That’s when I knew it was time for The First Cut.

So on Friday, off we went, to an adorable place with racecar chairs for the kids, and off went the baby mullet, with a lock of it saved in a little baggie for me.

With that quick trim, my baby boy is transformed, less baby, more boy. His features are emphasized in a totally different way -- his face seems more grown-up, but I think it’s just that his cheeks and ears are more noticeable without the wisps surrounding them. Where he seemed all eyes before, now his face seems more balanced, more developed.

He still grabs my hair at bedtime, and I pat his sweet head, realizing it’s the baby stage I’m missing, not the mullet, as my littlest (and last) guy takes another incremental step from babyhood to boyhood.

It was just a haircut, but the first cut is the deepest, even though I know that’s not what they were talking about when they wrote that song.

Note: Maybe I was influenced by this "Stop Fakebooking" blog post, even though I actually found it extremely irritating. I mean, I could have tossed this up on Pinterest as a fun project and left it at that. But that's not what happened. So here you go:

I'm not going to lie: Since our cross-country move a few weeks ago, I've felt like something of a stay-at-home mom fail.

Four days after we got here, we started researching preschools and daycares, which didn't exactly match up with my expectations of how things would be once I wasn't working at my extremely busy newspaper job of almost 14 years.

But the 4-year-old, who had been in full-time daycare since he was 7 months old, was begging to go back to school, and frankly, I was already worrying that he was going to lose his school routine, and possibly some of his reading and writing skills, before starting kindergarten this fall.

And if I'm going to launch my photography business here and do freelance work as planned, clearly, I'll need time for that. But still. I thought we'd last at least a week.

Nonetheless, the kiddos started their part-time program last week, and they love it. (And hey, I started on my research and wrote a couple of freelance articles, so the plan is working, right?)

But it is part-time, so yesterday, one of their home days, I thought we'd have a ton of fun -- the park since it was sunny, some drawing, some reading, maybe a picnic ... the possibilities were endless.

Until the 4-year-old woke up with a serious case of boundary busting. I want to watch another showwwwww! I want another snaaaaaack! I don’t want to go outsiiiiiiiiiide! I just want to be by myselllllllllf!

I mean, in a way, I can hardly blame him: His routine that's lasted most of his life has been completely undone. He just left all his friends. We're in a new and unfamiliar house. I'd be freaking out, too. But still, no.

The last straw was when my mom came over, and he was stomping around saying he wanted her to leave. Nuh-uh. Not OK.

The plan changed: Baby would stay with my mom, and I'd take the boy out for some one-on-one time. Stat. But first, I'd have to install the gargantuan car seat in my mom's car, during which I bashed myself in the side of the head with it -- hard -- and burst into tears of pain, a little, but frustration mostly. Argh.

I don't know if it was seeing me frustrated too that turned him around, but the kiddo kind of got it back together at that point. Before we left, he told my mom that actually, he wanted her to come over every day, and he was excited about our outing.

We had fun walking around the grocery store and getting our bearings before picking out our lunch. He was a total sweetheart while we were eating, bursting with questions and telling me all about his new school, his energy now bubbling out positively instead of negatively. Ahhhh, better.

Walking through the produce section, I caught sight of some positively gorgeous rainbow carrots. "Look at these!" I told him. "Did you even know carrots came in this many colors?" He was fascinated, and I had a brainstorm. We'd get them and cut them up and have a taste test -- a scientific experiment, if you will. Brilliant!

Later, at home, I asked if he wanted to help me clean them up, and he said no thanks. So I washed them and scraped them. When I cut open the purple carrot, I saw it was pale orange in the middle. "Hey, check this out! Did you know it was going to be different colors in the center? Cool, huh?" Neat, Mom. (Whatever, Mom.) Then I cut them into sticks and offered them up for the taste test -- and got another no thank you.

Wind out of my sails, I started mindlessly slicing the carrots into rounds and before I realized what I was doing, I'd arranged them into a pattern on the cutting board.

"Hey, that's cool," I thought. "Almost like an art project you'd do with your kid. If your kid wanted to participate."

He later tried a few of the carrots, and the rest went into the night's beef stew. And I don't know, the mere creative act of making something pretty out of something unexpected made me happy, even if it didn't meet my initial "do something creative with the kids" expectation.

We're figuring this being-at-home stuff out together, even if it's only part-time. Together was kind of the point, right?

Art project idea that might work out for you (even though it didn’t for me):

Get a bunch of rainbow carrots, or a couple each of purple, yellow, red-orange and orange. Clean and slice into rounds. See what kind of patterns you can make with all the colors. Then eat! (For the record, they tasted mostly the same, so my taste-test idea was kind of a bust. You’re welcome.)

A year ago today, my husband returned from Afghanistan and was reunited with our son Isaac, then 3, and met our newborn, Aaron.

In that moment, I faced a familiar struggle: Be in the moment or document the moment?

Logistics won out, at least at first. After Judah stepped off the bus, I hung back with Aaron and let Isaac be the first to welcome his dad home. Holding the baby, I couldn’t really handle the camera, so I just stood there and soaked it in as the two of them apprised each other and then hugged.

Then Judah and I locked eyes and I said something silly like, “I have someone I’d like you to meet.” I handed Aaron to Judah and just watched them look at each other. Aaron, nearly 10 weeks old, gazed at his dad, then started crying. Despite my best efforts, the bus had arrived at mealtime. I passed over a bottle and let Judah take over feeding duties for a few minutes until Aaron calmed down. He didn’t want to let go, and besides, it was his turn.

Then, hands unexpectedly free, I just couldn’t resist documenting the scene that was unfolding before me and committed a few images to my memory card, not just my memory.

Isaac ran around my legs as I captured the picture of Judah in uniform, nuzzling Aaron’s forehead, with Aaron giving a tiny, contented smile.

It’s probably the most meaningful photograph I’ve taken to date, which made me realize that for me, documenting the moment is part of being in the moment. It adds to the experience; it doesn’t distract, doesn’t detract. The lesson instead is that when I can’t manage the camera, I will be there completely and take it all in, rather than worrying about missing the shot.

I might not have a canvas print of Judah and Isaac’s reunion, but it’s seared on my memory all the same.

When my now-husband and I moved out to the East Coast in 1999, we were convinced it would be temporary. A couple of years, maybe a couple more, but after that, we'd be headed somewhere else. For sure. No doubt.

I guess nearly 14 years counts as temporary somewhere. But finally we are headed somewhere else -- back home to Oregon, to be near our families and back in the part of the world we're so passionate about.

So in a month or so, we'll be all packed up (or at least, we'd better be!) and off to new horizons.